A Penitent Season: Day 9

Note: This is a series of 14-days of erotic penance written in real-time available exclusively to my patrons. It's our observation of a real fucked up version of Lent. You can access the entire series at this tag.

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Day 9 

There is festivity in the air this morning. Holi is very big where we live. It's so big that it's not a day, it's a season and people come from all over the country to experience the Holi of this city. Everyone is off work, everyone is excited and drugged, there are colours in the air and sweets in the offing, and I feel like my gaze is turning the whole world black.

As it should be, really. If you see a red door, you know what to do.

I woke up wanting to be on my knees. As soon as my eyes opened, I wanted to slide off the bed and kneel on the floor. I felt some uneasiness in my chest, like a secret you know will keep haunting you until you admit to it, and I couldn't wait for him to wake up so I could admit it to him. I know where all of my guilt resides now — in emotion and imperfection — I've been reviewing the daily lists I have made and there are such clear patterns to my guilt. I believe I have no right to a reaction. I have no right to inconvenience the world with my emotions. I must not be upset when something upsets me. I must never get angry. In a room full of people, I must cater to the emotions of all, while never revealing that I have any. Even if I am going through something, I believe that the emotions of the stakeholders in my life in response to what is happening to me are more permitted and valid than mine. It's how I was raised. If you were ill, it didn't matter what you were feeling, you had to get better because you were inconveniencing your parents into worrying about you.

A thousand little things and a dozen big ones reinforced this message to me so strongly, I now spend my life apologising for my emotions. I am *shocked* when things actually impact me. I tell my husband that all the time, whenever I actually have an emotional reaction that is strong enough for me to take note or to actively emote, I tell him that I cannot believe that things actually impact me. I really cannot believe it because I do the math first, I calculate the emotion that is reasonable to feel and then I solve the emotion by introducing an established solution or an inevitability that I have to accept, and then then it's resolved. When things linger past this process, I feel guilty for wasting my time and the potential attention of other people in my life on useless things. I do not believe my emotions are allowed, I think they are wasteful, and I carry around a world of guilt for feeling them anyway.

And then there is the imperfection.

I have decided that I cannot do anything wrong and everything that doesn't pass the test is an active reason to diminish myself and my value. If I didn't work for eight hours today, I would be useless. If I felt tired even at the end of the day, I would be useless. I have to sleep because it is a non-optional bodily convention, not because I am tired. None of it is allowed. All failure is completely unacceptable and everything less than an unflinching standard of perfection is failure. I am scrutinizing my behaviour at a level where I will deem myself a failure for thoughts of failure. If I even considered not going to the gym today, but then actually went, I would consider that a failure. If I considered taking a day off for absolutely no reason, I would consider myself useless. These exacting standards, which I would be happy to blame on my mother but aren't really entirely her fault, are keeping me from living more intuitively to my own detriment. I will never be perfect by my yardstick and perhaps it is time to question who the yardstick even serves. What is the goal of this yardstick? What would happen if I were to actually attain perfection? Clearly, it would be the most anti-climactic part of the story, which is why I keep shifting the goal-post. I know there is nothing there. I keep doing it because I want to feel the guilt.

I needed him to wake him so I could beg him to punish me for having emotions and being imperfect.

I know that sounds like I have learnt the wrong lesson but let's not be bogged down by simplistic reasoning and generic, monolithic solutions. In the past eight days, the locus of my guilt has been actively sexual. He has been punishing me unrelentingly for and with every emotion he does not allow me to have, every reaction that demands I be seen in my humanity and every lapse of perfection no matter how minuscule. As a result I've been able to continue experiencing enough guilt to not panic while I observe the inner-workings of my treatment of myself. At that point, it would be detrimental for me to tell myself to just stop feeling guilty, it would be like telling a person with nine fingers to just grow another one, but I can manipulate the guilt into a sphere where it serves me, and in the vacated sphere of my emotional mechanisms, I can finally do some actual work. And it, somehow, is working.

I didn't guide him, nor did I know all of this so clearly when we started, but somehow our interactions naturally led to this place. This is my favourite thing about both sexual/romantic relationships and writing, you never know where the story will go when you start writing it. There's a Nigerian writer named Akwaeke Emezi. In an interview, she was talking about writing a romance novel right after she finished working on a work of speculative fiction. She said she started writing it because she thought it would be relaxing and fun, but she came to realise through the process how the formulaic nature of romance writing was hurting the genre because even though her approach to the characters she was writing started off as callous, at some point the characters demanded they be harked in their entirety.

"Bitch, I have depths," she quoted her character as having said to her.

That's the nature of writing, sex and love that makes me love life. You don't know, ever, where any of it will go but the process of discovery is filled with wonderment. I don't know how my husband and I came to be here, and in these things, in writing, sex and love, I do not feel the same pressure to take charge and make it all happen. I don't feel worried about perfection and curation. I don't even think about how it will all come together. The magic is not in what happens, it's in how it happens. It's in the interactions. In the moments in between action, whether as I write or fuck, when I sit quietly with my eyes closed because I wouldn't be able to absorb all of it if I didn't. I wouldn't be able to feel its immensity in motion, nor in active thought, it has to pass through me. That is the most pleasurable moment of life. It's the one that matters to me the most. Maybe it is, meaning. Maybe that is why, despite all of my neurotic tendencies, these spaces of my life remain uninfringed. I am safe from my own judgement in these spaces because I recognise their value to a point where even if I doubt it, I won't question it, because I am not big enough, nor vast enough, to know everything that needs to be known to make that decision. I deify love and writing to the point where I really need no other god. In them, I am free.

And by bringing my guilt into these rooms to observe and understand, I have allowed myself to experience some of this freedom in other spheres of my existence. In the past nine days, I have slept in and felt perfectly okay about it. I have enforced boundaries with people for the sole purpose of *my* well-being. I have distorted my work schedules and timings in ways I would never dream of having done a month ago, and you know? Everything got done anyway and I didn't have to be stressed. I have challenged my perpetual need to seek validation in the form of assent for my existence from people who refuse to see the world for all its problems. I have skipped the gym with no self-loathing inner monologue. I have allowed myself to waver from unrelenting discipline because its purpose is becoming unclear and its enforcement has gotten so harsh, I can see now why it exists only because I need enough reasons to keep yelling at myself. I will not work through all of the guilt in fourteen days, but I am building mechanisms I never thought I would be courageous enough to attempt.

So I had to wake him up.

To punish me.

...

I think he will kill me today, I think today is the day I die.

...

The Sterillium just lives at my desk now. For a while I kept putting it back in the closet in my quest to get rid of every little bit of clutter, but he needs to disinfect me (and the rest of his toys) so often these days I have to take it back out five times a day. It just lives here now.

I think he will kill me today. I think today is the day I die.

He has been caning my thighs every hour. It only takes five minutes because he only does it ten times each time, but it feels like he is setting me on fire every sixty minutes to test various accelerants. It's happened four times already since this morning and I don't think it stops until I go to bed. Unless he intends to have me wake up every hour and cane myself ten times. Which I would do.

It should hurt more.

I keep thinking that, and I now realise it's because I have been sitting up, able to see my thighs, while he administers these canings. I think seeing the impact coming makes it easier to bear, somehow, he says it's because your eyes are telling your brain to brace for impact and it's able to calculate how strong the impact will be and make the necessary adjustments to get through it in time. I think it's kindness, but it's probably accidental. He wasn't very kind when I looked at him in surprise two canings ago when he put the cane down and began to punch my arms afterwards. It was a momentary lapse in judgment, it was naive of me to assume that just because he is caning me every hour, he wouldn't hurt me any other way and my face betrayed my surprise before I had the chance to rein in that emotion. He took issue with it.

"You will take whatever the fuck I give you," he said, holding my face in his hand, "The only response you will have is to thank me and nothing else, do you fucking understand? The nice guy from last week isn't here anymore."

The nice guy? The *nice* guy? I think he is audacious in his approach. In the moment, it's attractive and after the fact, it's amusing. As a concept , his estimation of himself is appalling. Still, he is right, he is much more cruel than he was last week. I knew this would happen, my body is just a means to get to what he really wants to break, my heart, and I am worn down now. I have no defences. I am all emotion, obedience and despair. These are his favourite toys. He has been testing it, telling me to do things, not big things, not even tasks really, just notions. He's been telling me to stand up, go out of the room, put on shoes or bend over, and relishing the fact that I just do it without even taking a beat to question or wonder why. I can feel his thrill as I obey him without any resistance at all. Not even resistance of thought or reflex inside my own head.

I can also feel my thrill.

I am drawn to a state of unquestioning obedience and I don't really enjoy having that state extracted by ethical or compassionate means. I want to be eroded, coerced and rendered helpless. I want him to conjure the circumstances that defeat me like a majestic act of theatre into which I am thrust without script or preparation. I want him to direct me without consulting me. The resultant state of my heart, of my behaviour, is like a drug my body forgets and is surprised by each time it is administered again. I feel unencumbered by the world, how does it matter to me? All that matters is that I stand when he tells me to stand. How copacetic it is to be able to embody this state, where I can forget about meaning and structure, and exist only to stand if told.

...

After the last caning, he fucked me with the dildo and then with his fingers. I think I asked for it. After he put the cane down, I leaned backwards, as if to suggest that I should lay down on my back. He pushed me into the bed, fucked me with his fingers and then pushed the dildo inside me. I think he intended to just leave it there because he enjoys knowing that I am filled up in a hole where I hate it, for no reason except that he wants me to keep passively hurting. After he pushed it in, he seemed to retreat.

I rolled over onto my stomach and lifted my hips up to him myself. It was an act of shame that I performed because I wanted to feel the arousal elicited by the same. It felt a little sick to brandish myself like this, to go to him so I can make a pornographic display of my confession to arousal, but I wanted to do it so much. I wanted to tell him that I won't stop being a dirty, filthy whore who is turned on by her own state of disgrace so much that even the complete destruction of her holes won't stop her from wanting more.   

And he did give it to me.

I didn't fight it at all that time. I felt the panic, the blind urgency to make him evacuate my cunt, the instant sense of shame and amends, I felt all of it, but none of it turned into reaction.  I just lay there and took it, my cunt made me do it. It made me ask him for more. It made me prostrate my need to feel punished and make a pathetic display of it. I stayed in that position for a long time after he stopped, with my hips pushed up in the air, and my cunt leaking onto my thighs. He walked around humiliating me. Telling me how disappointing and disgusting I was to make a display like this.

The humiliation was always coming, I know that, but he is the worst of himself when that's his goal. I want the sun now. Can I keep it from being night?

...

Each time he pulled the soaking wet section of cloth off my face or I pulled it off myself because of the panic, the first thing I would see, was the bulge in his shorts. The first time I thought I was imagining it, the second time I tried to convince myself that it was the light and the angle that made it seem like an erection but soon enough, it became impossible to deny. Waterboarding me was making him hard.

I don't know how I feel about that.

The first spray of the water felt like the water always does. Whether it is the rain or the ocean, the first spray always feels like coming home. I'm surprised I don't have gills, but it became very clear, very quickly, that I do not have gills. In one second, it went from the refreshment of being alive to the abject horror of drowning. Years ago, when I used to be on board with my father, we would walk on the deck in the evenings and he would teach me all manners of superstitions and adages of sailors. One of his favourite things to tell me was that the ocean is like a disloyal woman, you will love her with a madness that makes you feel alive, but she will eat you alive if you trust her even a little bit. No one in my family ever took that class where they teach you what is appropriate to tell your kids and what is not.

"Love the water, Sickness," he used to say, using the strange little hypocorism he still uses for me today, "But the moment you trust it, it will kill you."

My relationship with the water is so heavily informed by his, from the enthusiasm to the romanticism, my terrified, deferential love of the water is my inheritance from my father. And perhaps it is that inheritance that led me to the man I love, as well. He is the ocean. He loves me and he holds enough destruction to kill me in an instant. I love him but it is idiocy to let my guard down around him. He holds all of my peace and all of the power to it. He makes me feel alive and he takes away my breath.

God, how he took away my breath.

I do not like to be waterboarded. I've drowned enough before to know how it feels, it's not comparable to much else in the world. In comparison — all the fists, the canes, the baseball bats — they're child's play. There is the possibility for him to tell me to be quiet and take it when he beats me, because he can still access the person I am in that state of suffering. There is no person when you are drowning, there is only the human will to fight for its life. You cannot hide from this panic, you cannot meditate the terror away, you cannot grasp at your skin to distract your brain. If you are drowning, you can focus only on the fact that you are drowning. I was not a person, I was not his slave, I was not even myself, I was just drowning.

In seconds, it took mere seconds, for the panic to turn into an attempt to get away. I didn't fight him, but I tried to fight the water. Which, I know, is futile. I have the words tattooed on my ankle — *Don't fight the ocean* — yet I tried. I tried so hard I thrashed around in his grasp, I tried to pull the cloth off my face, again and again. He kicked me and put it back every single time. I tried to communicate that this dread, this insidious fear, it wasn't the erotic allure of dangerous, it was the human will fighting not to die, but he didn't seem to care.

His cock was hard.

I really don't know how I feel about that. I know it turns him on to hurt me. I know it turns him on to beat me, torture me, humiliate me, torment me and reduce my heart to rubble, all of that just feels like the love of a sadist. This didn't feel like love. It didn't feel like romance. It didn't feel like sadism. It felt like he was getting off to threatening me with death, in some ways it felt like the furthest reaches of his cruelty, and that erection felt like it was mocking me. It felt like it was showing me that he wasn't going to give me any mercy, why would he? Why would he even offer me the respite of lying bent over the floor for him to fuck when he could get all his sexual pleasure from tormenting me with the sensation of death?

He dragged me across the bathroom floor, to the other end and propped me against the wall. The soaking wet cloth rested on my head. He punched me and kicked me while I cried and begged. It didn't hurt very much, but really, I couldn't take anymore, I couldn't take anymore of anything at all. Even the disgruntled expression on his face, the one that has been telling me everyday that I am disappointing, felt like a hot iron skewer through the heart. As he reached over to pull the cloth back over my head, I began to beg so earnestly, I almost felt sorry for myself. I thought for sure that he would heed my calls for mercy, I could feel in my own face that I had never begged like that before in my entire life.

"You want me to stop, is it?" He asked, holding my face by the chin, "I will stop when I fucking please and you will shut the fuck up and take it. Pull the cloth back over your face."

I did it. It didn't feel like I had much choice. I had to do what the water told me to do. I fought even harder, though, I kept coming back and pulling it off my face, and he kept beating me and forcing me to put it back in place. At one point it felt like my tears were adding to the flood and I was drowning in them as well. Each time he pulled the cloth off, I begged, each time I begged, my stupid little heart really believed that he would stop. Despite all evidence, I kept on believing. He kept up showing me that I am a fool.

I've made a huge mistake.

I've trusted the water. Now it's going to kill me.

...